It's the television video editing standard. Everyone uses it. Why? It's quality shit. ESPN, the six o'clock news, Jeapordy... all of gets transferred on Betacam SP tapes.
I always wondered why Japanese video games made such a big damned deal out the characters blood types. Doubly curious becausee blood typing as it applies to science and biochemistry has NEVER FEATURED IN A SINGLE GAME I'VE PLAYED.
You should familiarize yourself with The Original Series. The sci-fi topic:O face is one of the aliens from one of the episodes. I quite honestly forget which, unfortunately.:P
After the painfull suck of Ep1 and a few minutes of watching Annakin blather early in Ep2, I took to hitting "next chapter" whenever Annakin, Padme, or Jarjar showed up.
The movie wound up being about 45 minutes long and vastly more tolerable... though the Big Huge Battle was less entertaining than a six-episode grunt/fireball in Dragonball Z.
Likewise, I object to the water core and the overt over-cgi. It's just too damned obvious, imo, and it hasn't aged well.
Also, mitichlorians or however they're spelled. Way to ruin it.:|
That aside, I have a different outlook on the Jedi bits. Yoda kicking it dervish style annoyed the shit out of me, but hey, he's a master of the Force.... and he's obviously using it only when he NEEDS to. Yeah, he could use it to get around without the cane, but the fact is that he can still walk without the force- using it for something that mundane would be a waste of the abilities.
As for plummeting... well, psychokinesis is a Force ability. If you're good enough (in theory), you could direct and slow your fall without much difficulty- zipping down and slowing up enough to cushion the landing.
Still. I followed the development of EpI and frieking HATED it (big screen, opening night, and it sucked so hard I actually fell asleep during the gungan battle due to a collosal lack of interest). I was passe about EpII- especially given that what got everyone drooling was the effects. Hell, I knew what to expect from EpI and ILM had already been surpassed by better studios (and better directors) at that point.
EpIII? Maybe I'll catch it on DVD when a friend of mine picks it up in the used bin. Hopefully I'll be able to stomach more of it than EpII.
One of the reasons I've stuck with Apple over the years- it's the little details like this that seriously add to the experience, and make older versions of the operating system so painless to troubleshoot.:D
Atlivec makes a difference, though unoptimized apps (such as Photoshop 5 or Bryce, for example) don't use altivec and consequently would be the same speed on a 900mhz g3 or 900mhz g4.
Video makes a HUGE difference- which is why the used / secondhand mac market is really depressing. QE only runs on the AGP bus, and only with certain cards- if you have a Rage128 or a beige g3, you're up the creek on video accelleration.:/
I've noticed that my home file server, work file server, and workstations go CLUNK and hughalhughalahughalahughala around four in the morning ("bedtime")- when cron runs by default. This causes iTunes and VLC to skip on a G4, and brought my fileserver to its KNEES. (nothing chungs like an SCA drive!:D)
It's a unix. It has timed jobs that optimize the system. My powerbook ran like ASS until I left the thing on and running for 24 hours, after which it seemed to get its act together.
HFS+ was one of the major features of the OS 8.1 update. OS 8.0 and earlier can't "see" HFS+ volumes- they see a tiny disk with a simpletext file titled "where have all my files gone?" which, if I remember correctly, gives a brief explanation that the disk is HFS+ and requires 8.1 or higher to view.:)
Journalling didn't show up until one of the Jaguar updates, where it could be enabled via the command line on clients and via disk utility on Server.
Add Altivec instructions to a G3 and you have a G4. I'm sure there are other minor differences, but that's basically all there is to it.
From personal experience, OS X with a QE-capable video card on a G4 totally SMOKES OS X on a same mhz G3 without the QE board. I have, in my grumpier moments (which are many) stated that it takes a G4 to make OS X useable at all (for anything beyond, say... email.) The current stock at the Apple Store seems to back up this view.
MOL allows you to do this already. I lack the fu to make the damned thing work, or I'd be doing just that!
Mac on Linux is basically a VM of sorts that allows you to run the MacOS inside of Linux on PPC hardware.
PPC hardware meaning IBM AS/400s, POWER workstations, and lots of other non-Apple hardware. Definitely a niche market, but extremely neat nonetheless. Apparently the performance isn't THAT bad, though the one live demo I've seen of it (on a Wall Street, which may account for this) was SLOW. The guy showing it to me said that it lacked 2d accelleration.:|
Since I live in Photoshop, that's kind of a bad thing- but I don't imagine it being ANY worse than running Photoshop in OS X.
Because hypothetically, this thing will get optimized to the point where it should be possible to run OS X acceptably. And there are people out there who are interested in such a thing, such as myself- I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- and it took another 300$ in upgrades to make it useable (to say nothing of the ~200$ worth of parts I'm permaborrowing to make it functional for entertainment purposes). That's a four year old machine.
By contrast, I can get a used PC (from a coworker) that's faster (133mhz bus as opposed to the 100 in the G4), at a used price of half the present value of the parts he put into it... which is about 160$.
The economically disadvantaged don't get the luxury of modern high-powered Macintoshes- for the price of a three-year-old G4, I can build a CURRENT PC.
If I could run OS X at useable speeds through an emulation system on a CURRENT PC, I'd buy the hardware and do things that way- seeing as how a current PC (bare bones) is between 1/4 and 3/4 the price of a current useable (re: expandable) Mac.
I'm with the AC. Time travel in the trek universe has historically been a joke- contrast against Red Dwarf (which does it for humor and still does it better), or Babylon 5 or 12 Monkeys (both of which use time travel effectively as part of a storyline in which time travel affects the larger whole, rather than breaking it.)
The only amusing Time Travel episode I've seen of Trek is the "Trouble with Tribbles" "sequel" episode of DS9- though episodes of TNG dealing with stasis (being "stuck" in time, vehicles and personnel from the past) are more plausible.
Saying the TCW will fix screwups of Trek continuity (such as it is) is like saying the Segway will fix walking. Ain't happening.
No wonder my first impression of Enterprise was that it sucked the shit out of a dead man's ass. >_
I cooled on Trek when I read about the Voyager cast (the Doctor being an obvious Red Dwarf rip and Neelix being too annoying for words)... I was hoping Enterprise wouldn't suck ass, but between the obvious T&A, the HORRIBLE intro music (this is Space : The Final Frontier, not DAWSONS CREEK) and a plot synopsis with the words "temporal cold war" in it, well.... other production companies have been doing much better with much less for much longer- without shitting all over their own continuities.
Toy Story, Monsters Inc, and Finding Nemo were BIG BIG BIG movies that pulled in a lot of cash and were extremely popular.
Bugs Life and Antz happened right around the same time, causing some degree of o_O for moviegoers. There's nothing like TS, MI, or FN within the same release proximity.
Specifically in RPGs. I loved the old NES games- Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy (the FIRST ONE), because they had plot- but not really any story to speak of. They were fun, as any personality the characters had existed solely in my own mind. As technology and capacity advanced, RPGs changed from being open-ended objective-based games into interactive novels, and are, in my opinion, the worse for it. Largely because interactive novels like FF7 and FF8 are being marketed as RPGs. Bit of an annoyance, especially when you're locked into a mildly decent story focusing on characters you don't like dealing with emotional problems you got over years ago. Flexibility of armor and weapons - one of the fun points of earlier RPGs- got flushed right out of Square games, leaving Diablo and the DnD games to fill in that gap in the market.
A bad story, a story that forces itself onto the player, or a story with characters that are annoying (like the frog in chrono trigger. GAH.) are largely why I've dropped console RPGs in favor of games like Kingdom of Loathing and (as much as I hate to say it) Baldur's Gate / Icewind Dale. The things I liked about the OLD console RPGs are things that Enix and Square seem to have totally lost sight of.:-(
Personally, the story needs to be a backdrop and little more, or so finely tuned that you can easily immerse yourself into it while retaining the flexibility and free-form approach that old console games had- the first Metal Gear Solid is a good example of this, though it's kind of meh in the replay department.
Personally, if I want a story, I'll read comics or pick up a novel... but when I'm in the mood for a game, I'm in the mood for a GAME, not paging through some spiky haired adolescent brat whining about his life through cut scene after cut scene after cut scene.:P
I could barely scrape together enough cash for a used dual G4, and have it adapted to an old Apple plug Trinitron from the mid nineties. Came with a combo drive. I don't have the luxury of being able to afford a television, let alone a DVD player that has no use other than playing video disks, which I borrow from friends on occasion.
Those days are gone for you, maybe. Others are not so priveleged.
Sudo (get, make new user, add user to sodoers, log out of root and log in as user); move system to testing, upgrade everything that's already present... after which, mysql, php, imagemagick, perl libraries for imagemagick. Anything else I need when I need it. SSH keygen; edit ssh config file for common hosts, move DSA key to common hosts.
OS X:
Copy functioning and broken-in classic environment from previous workstation (containing Photoshop 5.0.2 and a few other must-haves, as well as the CPU meter from Jaguar, which I like much more than the Activity Monitor); Quicksliver, Photoshop CS, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX, Toast, Wacom drivers, BZFlag, and then mop up the install with current DIVX codecs, VLC, MPlayer, SSH Keychain. Grab Fink for the sole purpose of GNU File Utilities. Spend the time during the install from optical media configuring the sytem how I want it (terminal preferences, login items, activate root, turn auto-login off, grab Matrix GL screensaver, configurw energy settings, set finder defaults). Run SW Update, reboot. SSH keygen, edit config file for common hosts, copy DSA key to frequently used accounts.
Work complete.
Assuming the target hard drive is formatted and partitioned how I want it, I can typically get a debian box up in 1/20th the time it takes to get an OS X install where I want it. But then, I don't use X Windows on linux.:-)
There's also the fact that computer applications are still horribly, horribly limited for simple things, like the ability to sketch in a notebook. I have pages of design notes with drafts and sections of the vehicle or piece of equipment in question next to them, all drawn out on the bus, at a bar, etceteras- doing the equivalent of a quick sketch inline with notes in software is murderously time consuming. You completely LOSE the spark of inspiration in the process of loading the application, configuring the file, setting your tools, and finally getting the thing out.:P
How does your game handle superpowers? I loved the Hero system but hated having to buy a bunch of power modifiers that were rarely used, or needing one I didn't have. I did a preliminary "port" of the Hero concepts to the White Wolf storyteller system, with the end goal of making power modifiers dynamically allocatable- they came out of your overall level, so you could do creative things with an attack for less of the brute force value. It worked on paper, but I never got around to play testing it.:P
As a DM, I never used HP as a "battery" of how many hits a character could take until he was down for the count. HP was essentially a measure of skill in avoiding attack damage, or deflecting the brunt of an attack. Higher level fighters have more hit points than lower level fighters because, in my mind (as the DM), to be that experienced meant you were much better at dodging or deflecting attacks. An attack that did 5 HP damage against a guy with 50 would be interpreted as a cut on the arm or similar location- the same damage against a person with 10 HP would be, say, a VERY nasty gash across the chest.
In my book, HP is just another metric of character competence, and augments armor nicely.
Doesn't mean I didn't occasionally fudge the hell out of my DM rolls to smack down or spare a player.:-)
The US has had a seriously anal and assholish ID system for YEARS. You basically do not exist if you don't have a driver's license or state ID- you can't get a bank account, booze, or cigarettes without one, among other things.
Oh, and they expire every couple of years and you have to pay to renew them. >:|
.... or wasted years actually LEARNING the CAD system.
Computerized drafting and visualization are awesome once you know how to make the applications do what you mean. Until you get to the top of the learning curve, they're almost worthless, or extremely time consuming at best.
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Betacam SP is another story entirely.
:)
It's the television video editing standard. Everyone uses it. Why? It's quality shit. ESPN, the six o'clock news, Jeapordy... all of gets transferred on Betacam SP tapes.
Good stuff.
Sony OCCASIONALLY gets it right.
I always wondered why Japanese video games made such a big damned deal out the characters blood types. Doubly curious becausee blood typing as it applies to science and biochemistry has NEVER FEATURED IN A SINGLE GAME I'VE PLAYED.
This sheds some light on it. O_o
Talk about discrimination! O.O
You should familiarize yourself with The Original Series. The sci-fi topic :O face is one of the aliens from one of the episodes. I quite honestly forget which, unfortunately. :P
That's handy! And I wouldn't have known about it otherwise- thanks!
After the painfull suck of Ep1 and a few minutes of watching Annakin blather early in Ep2, I took to hitting "next chapter" whenever Annakin, Padme, or Jarjar showed up.
The movie wound up being about 45 minutes long and vastly more tolerable... though the Big Huge Battle was less entertaining than a six-episode grunt/fireball in Dragonball Z.
Likewise, I object to the water core and the overt over-cgi. It's just too damned obvious, imo, and it hasn't aged well.
:|
Also, mitichlorians or however they're spelled. Way to ruin it.
That aside, I have a different outlook on the Jedi bits. Yoda kicking it dervish style annoyed the shit out of me, but hey, he's a master of the Force.... and he's obviously using it only when he NEEDS to. Yeah, he could use it to get around without the cane, but the fact is that he can still walk without the force- using it for something that mundane would be a waste of the abilities.
As for plummeting... well, psychokinesis is a Force ability. If you're good enough (in theory), you could direct and slow your fall without much difficulty- zipping down and slowing up enough to cushion the landing.
Still. I followed the development of EpI and frieking HATED it (big screen, opening night, and it sucked so hard I actually fell asleep during the gungan battle due to a collosal lack of interest). I was passe about EpII- especially given that what got everyone drooling was the effects. Hell, I knew what to expect from EpI and ILM had already been surpassed by better studios (and better directors) at that point.
EpIII? Maybe I'll catch it on DVD when a friend of mine picks it up in the used bin. Hopefully I'll be able to stomach more of it than EpII.
One of the reasons I've stuck with Apple over the years- it's the little details like this that seriously add to the experience, and make older versions of the operating system so painless to troubleshoot. :D
Atlivec makes a difference, though unoptimized apps (such as Photoshop 5 or Bryce, for example) don't use altivec and consequently would be the same speed on a 900mhz g3 or 900mhz g4.
:/
Video makes a HUGE difference- which is why the used / secondhand mac market is really depressing. QE only runs on the AGP bus, and only with certain cards- if you have a Rage128 or a beige g3, you're up the creek on video accelleration.
I've noticed that my home file server, work file server, and workstations go CLUNK and hughalhughalahughalahughala around four in the morning ("bedtime")- when cron runs by default. This causes iTunes and VLC to skip on a G4, and brought my fileserver to its KNEES. (nothing chungs like an SCA drive! :D)
It's a unix. It has timed jobs that optimize the system. My powerbook ran like ASS until I left the thing on and running for 24 hours, after which it seemed to get its act together.
HFS+ was one of the major features of the OS 8.1 update. OS 8.0 and earlier can't "see" HFS+ volumes- they see a tiny disk with a simpletext file titled "where have all my files gone?" which, if I remember correctly, gives a brief explanation that the disk is HFS+ and requires 8.1 or higher to view. :)
Journalling didn't show up until one of the Jaguar updates, where it could be enabled via the command line on clients and via disk utility on Server.
Add Altivec instructions to a G3 and you have a G4. I'm sure there are other minor differences, but that's basically all there is to it.
From personal experience, OS X with a QE-capable video card on a G4 totally SMOKES OS X on a same mhz G3 without the QE board. I have, in my grumpier moments (which are many) stated that it takes a G4 to make OS X useable at all (for anything beyond, say... email.) The current stock at the Apple Store seems to back up this view.
MOL allows you to do this already. I lack the fu to make the damned thing work, or I'd be doing just that!
:|
Mac on Linux is basically a VM of sorts that allows you to run the MacOS inside of Linux on PPC hardware.
PPC hardware meaning IBM AS/400s, POWER workstations, and lots of other non-Apple hardware. Definitely a niche market, but extremely neat nonetheless. Apparently the performance isn't THAT bad, though the one live demo I've seen of it (on a Wall Street, which may account for this) was SLOW. The guy showing it to me said that it lacked 2d accelleration.
Since I live in Photoshop, that's kind of a bad thing- but I don't imagine it being ANY worse than running Photoshop in OS X.
Because hypothetically, this thing will get optimized to the point where it should be possible to run OS X acceptably. And there are people out there who are interested in such a thing, such as myself- I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- and it took another 300$ in upgrades to make it useable (to say nothing of the ~200$ worth of parts I'm permaborrowing to make it functional for entertainment purposes). That's a four year old machine.
By contrast, I can get a used PC (from a coworker) that's faster (133mhz bus as opposed to the 100 in the G4), at a used price of half the present value of the parts he put into it... which is about 160$.
The economically disadvantaged don't get the luxury of modern high-powered Macintoshes- for the price of a three-year-old G4, I can build a CURRENT PC.
If I could run OS X at useable speeds through an emulation system on a CURRENT PC, I'd buy the hardware and do things that way- seeing as how a current PC (bare bones) is between 1/4 and 3/4 the price of a current useable (re: expandable) Mac.
I'm with the AC. Time travel in the trek universe has historically been a joke- contrast against Red Dwarf (which does it for humor and still does it better), or Babylon 5 or 12 Monkeys (both of which use time travel effectively as part of a storyline in which time travel affects the larger whole, rather than breaking it.)
The only amusing Time Travel episode I've seen of Trek is the "Trouble with Tribbles" "sequel" episode of DS9- though episodes of TNG dealing with stasis (being "stuck" in time, vehicles and personnel from the past) are more plausible.
Saying the TCW will fix screwups of Trek continuity (such as it is) is like saying the Segway will fix walking. Ain't happening.
No wonder my first impression of Enterprise was that it sucked the shit out of a dead man's ass. >_
I cooled on Trek when I read about the Voyager cast (the Doctor being an obvious Red Dwarf rip and Neelix being too annoying for words)... I was hoping Enterprise wouldn't suck ass, but between the obvious T&A, the HORRIBLE intro music (this is Space : The Final Frontier, not DAWSONS CREEK) and a plot synopsis with the words "temporal cold war" in it, well.... other production companies have been doing much better with much less for much longer- without shitting all over their own continuities.
Toy Story, Monsters Inc, and Finding Nemo were BIG BIG BIG movies that pulled in a lot of cash and were extremely popular.
Bugs Life and Antz happened right around the same time, causing some degree of o_O for moviegoers. There's nothing like TS, MI, or FN within the same release proximity.
Ergo, it makes sense to leave it off the blurp.
Specifically in RPGs. I loved the old NES games- Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy (the FIRST ONE), because they had plot- but not really any story to speak of. They were fun, as any personality the characters had existed solely in my own mind. As technology and capacity advanced, RPGs changed from being open-ended objective-based games into interactive novels, and are, in my opinion, the worse for it. Largely because interactive novels like FF7 and FF8 are being marketed as RPGs. Bit of an annoyance, especially when you're locked into a mildly decent story focusing on characters you don't like dealing with emotional problems you got over years ago. Flexibility of armor and weapons - one of the fun points of earlier RPGs- got flushed right out of Square games, leaving Diablo and the DnD games to fill in that gap in the market.
:-(
:P
A bad story, a story that forces itself onto the player, or a story with characters that are annoying (like the frog in chrono trigger. GAH.) are largely why I've dropped console RPGs in favor of games like Kingdom of Loathing and (as much as I hate to say it) Baldur's Gate / Icewind Dale. The things I liked about the OLD console RPGs are things that Enix and Square seem to have totally lost sight of.
Personally, the story needs to be a backdrop and little more, or so finely tuned that you can easily immerse yourself into it while retaining the flexibility and free-form approach that old console games had- the first Metal Gear Solid is a good example of this, though it's kind of meh in the replay department.
Personally, if I want a story, I'll read comics or pick up a novel... but when I'm in the mood for a game, I'm in the mood for a GAME, not paging through some spiky haired adolescent brat whining about his life through cut scene after cut scene after cut scene.
I understand his point. But for those of us who need machines, for whom entertainment is an OPTION, the hardware player is an unnecessary expenditure.
I could barely scrape together enough cash for a used dual G4, and have it adapted to an old Apple plug Trinitron from the mid nineties. Came with a combo drive. I don't have the luxury of being able to afford a television, let alone a DVD player that has no use other than playing video disks, which I borrow from friends on occasion.
Those days are gone for you, maybe. Others are not so priveleged.
Debian:
:
:-)
Sudo (get, make new user, add user to sodoers, log out of root and log in as user); move system to testing, upgrade everything that's already present... after which, mysql, php, imagemagick, perl libraries for imagemagick. Anything else I need when I need it. SSH keygen; edit ssh config file for common hosts, move DSA key to common hosts.
OS X
Copy functioning and broken-in classic environment from previous workstation (containing Photoshop 5.0.2 and a few other must-haves, as well as the CPU meter from Jaguar, which I like much more than the Activity Monitor); Quicksliver, Photoshop CS, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks MX, Toast, Wacom drivers, BZFlag, and then mop up the install with current DIVX codecs, VLC, MPlayer, SSH Keychain. Grab Fink for the sole purpose of GNU File Utilities. Spend the time during the install from optical media configuring the sytem how I want it (terminal preferences, login items, activate root, turn auto-login off, grab Matrix GL screensaver, configurw energy settings, set finder defaults). Run SW Update, reboot. SSH keygen, edit config file for common hosts, copy DSA key to frequently used accounts.
Work complete.
Assuming the target hard drive is formatted and partitioned how I want it, I can typically get a debian box up in 1/20th the time it takes to get an OS X install where I want it. But then, I don't use X Windows on linux.
There's also the fact that computer applications are still horribly, horribly limited for simple things, like the ability to sketch in a notebook. I have pages of design notes with drafts and sections of the vehicle or piece of equipment in question next to them, all drawn out on the bus, at a bar, etceteras- doing the equivalent of a quick sketch inline with notes in software is murderously time consuming. You completely LOSE the spark of inspiration in the process of loading the application, configuring the file, setting your tools, and finally getting the thing out. :P
How does your game handle superpowers? I loved the Hero system but hated having to buy a bunch of power modifiers that were rarely used, or needing one I didn't have. I did a preliminary "port" of the Hero concepts to the White Wolf storyteller system, with the end goal of making power modifiers dynamically allocatable- they came out of your overall level, so you could do creative things with an attack for less of the brute force value. It worked on paper, but I never got around to play testing it. :P
As a DM, I never used HP as a "battery" of how many hits a character could take until he was down for the count. HP was essentially a measure of skill in avoiding attack damage, or deflecting the brunt of an attack. Higher level fighters have more hit points than lower level fighters because, in my mind (as the DM), to be that experienced meant you were much better at dodging or deflecting attacks. An attack that did 5 HP damage against a guy with 50 would be interpreted as a cut on the arm or similar location- the same damage against a person with 10 HP would be, say, a VERY nasty gash across the chest.
:-)
In my book, HP is just another metric of character competence, and augments armor nicely.
Doesn't mean I didn't occasionally fudge the hell out of my DM rolls to smack down or spare a player.
Er.
The US has had a seriously anal and assholish ID system for YEARS. You basically do not exist if you don't have a driver's license or state ID- you can't get a bank account, booze, or cigarettes without one, among other things.
Oh, and they expire every couple of years and you have to pay to renew them. >:|
.... or wasted years actually LEARNING the CAD system.
Computerized drafting and visualization are awesome once you know how to make the applications do what you mean. Until you get to the top of the learning curve, they're almost worthless, or extremely time consuming at best.